Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is the first exhibition to survey the work of acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Mary Ellen Carroll. The exhibition focuses on a selection of key projects spanning more than four decades, several of which remain ongoing and include new works realized in collaboration with CAMH. The exhibition charts the import and impact of Carroll’s engagement with questions of agency and identity, as well as the artist’s exploration of some of the most urgent issues of our time, including environmental sustainability, social justice, immigration, and urban legislation.
Since the 1980s, Carroll has produced a heterogeneous body of work taking the form of performance, film, photography, writing, architecture, public art, and policy. Yet, the artist’s primary medium is the field of social relations that govern a given time and context. An inheritor of conceptual, project-based, and institutional-critique-based practices, Carroll puts pressure on the conditions within which a work of art gains legibility, while never forsaking formal and aesthetic considerations. By their own account, each project is approached by asking, “what do we consider a material as a work of art and what is the problem I am trying to solve?” Carroll’s approach to art-making is collaborative and research-based, often involving years of planning, coordination, and community engagement. As the exhibition title’s allusion to famed comedian and rabble-rouser Lenny Bruce suggests, Carroll is equally a trickster, scamp, and intermediary, applying a wryly humorous (though no less critical) approach to addressing society’s most pressing issues.
Many of Carroll’s works are ongoing and intentionally durational as is the case with their landmark, multifaceted project, prototype 180 (1999-ongoing). Sited in the Sharpstown neighborhood of Houston, prototype 180 remains a legendary intervention into urban policy in a city known for its famous lack of zoning and idiosyncratic land-use policies, and has taken multiple forms since its inception, most notably the 180-degree rotation of a mid-century suburban house in 2010 and the subsequent “unbuilding” of the structure in 2017. Works such as prototype 180 reveal the durational quality of the artist’s larger artistic project, as well as Carroll’s tendency to avoid market-based criteria in favor of a rigorous, continuously unfolding, and adaptive mode of art making that is often geographically and temporally dispersed. Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People continues CAMH’s tradition of presenting scholarly and in-depth survey exhibitions dedicated to the work of historically significant artists at pivotal moments in their career. The exhibition will include selected works from the 1980s to the present, such as My Death is Pending... Because. (1986-2017), The Doppelganger Tapes, (1993-ongoing), prototype 180 (1999-ongoing), Federal (2003), indestructible language (2006-ongoing), and PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0 (2008-ongoing), among others, as well as a series of new commissions.
Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People highlights the multifaceted, aesthetically rigorous work of an artist who has demonstrated deft institutional critiques of art and used their artwork to interact with and question the politics and policies surrounding social and physical structures, including the ways in which bodies navigate these spaces. Employing a conceptually-driven form of exhibition making, the exhibition both honors and mirrors Carroll’s recursive, materially diverse, and ecologically-attuned practice through a display in which works are always seen through, between, and in relation to each other. Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers the occasion to reconsider Carroll’s work and the questions it raises about identity and intimacy, objects/ideas and their afterlives, and the value that political and social activism informed by humor and play might offer contemporary critical practices.
